Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone

Years ago, the night news editor at the newspaper where I worked got upset when his frivolous story judgment was questioned by another editor.

"We can either put out a history book or a comic book," he said, taking a defensive swipe at a rebellious strand of hair. "I know which one I'm putting out."

He was clearly a man ahead of his time.

Welcome to the comic-book generation, the post-literate society. The stories that excited my news editor's imagination then -- the ones packed with lurid sex, vapid celebrity shenanigans, fallen idols -- are merely the plat du jour of journalism these days.

It doesn't matter whether you're reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone's inane blog -- the quality bar is set lower than ever, which is saying a lot considering it was never set very high to begin with.

But I'll save the critical examination of my profession for another column. Today, I want to talk about one of the byproducts of all this mediocrity. Today I want to talk about the all-out assault on the English language and the role technology plays in that unprovoked and dastardly attack. I especially want to talk about the ways dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo.

Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, "Well, at least people are writing again." Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it's reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would.

The very nature of e-mail (which, along with first cousins IM and text messaging, is an undeniably handy means of chatting) encourages sloppy "penmanship," as it were. Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.

But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It's important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well. It's important to maintain high standards. It's important to think before you write.

The technology of instant -- or near-instant -- communication works against that. But it's not as if you can't surmount this obstacle. You only have to be willing to try.

Technology conspires against language in another, more insidious way: The sheer speed with which things move these days has given us the five-second attention span, the 10-second sound bite and the splashy infographic that tells you very little, if anything, while fooling you into thinking that you are now somehow informed. (Of course, if you need more than 10 seconds to "get" Mariah Carey, well, shame on you.)

Sadly, this devalues the thoughtful essayist and the sheer linguistic joy of the exposition. And the language dies a little more each day.

Then there's the havoc wrought on spelling and punctuation by all this casual communication. You can't lay all that at the feet of technology, of course. Grammar skills have been eroding in this country for years and that has a lot more to do with lax instruction than it does with e-mail or instant messaging. (Math is a different matter. No student should be allowed to bring a calculator into a math class. Ever.)

But couple those deficient grammar skills with the shorthand that's become prevalent in fast communication (not to mention all those irritating acronyms: LOL, WYSIWYG, IMHO, etc.) and you've just struck a match next to a can of gasoline. And people wonder why the tone of e-mail is so easily misunderstood.

On another front, we live in a world where the creep of tech and business jargon threatens to make the language indecipherable to everyone, even the spewer of this bilge water. It's amazing that any business gets done at all, with junk like this clotting our communications arteries.